Over the last month, we have been sharing some of our customers most exciting and successful interactive content stories on our Medium account. Each story had some compelling data that supported the transition from static content to interactive content. And, all of these customers had successfully adopted interactive content into their marketing strategy, which meant that the resources available to them—training, support documentation, chat support, and their dedicated Account Managers—were more than likely leveraged.

But, this made me realize that even though we had a wealth of resources available on our site to our customers, there was not anything that shared the basics of interactive content with our audience. We jumped head first into interactive content and somehow had forgotten to start at the basics.

So, this month, I am taking us back—way back to the beginning of interactive content.

Let’s Get Back to the Basics - Why Interactive Content?

ion interactive did not start as an interactive content marketing platform. For the first few years, ion was a boutique web development firm creating experiences for customers like Cisco & Office Depot. Eventually, ion shifted focus to landing pages and ultimately interactive content. As the creative landscape changed, so did ion. We are proud to say we have evolved with the times and managed to stay agile in our approach to content.

About five years ago, we started to notice an increase in content creation for the web. We saw more blogs, more articles, and overall a lot more focus on inbound. And with more brands trying to reach their audience by creating content, it became apparent that there needed to be a better way to measure engagement and interest with these content pieces.

With traditional static content pieces, we can spend hours or even days creating content that may or may not be read, enjoyed, or shared. While it’s easy to tell if a user visited your blog by reviewing analytics, it is impossible to know how interested they were in the content you supplied. But, when you add interactions mixed in with copy, you will be able to accurately measure how effective your content was at capturing your audience's attention.

If you can learn more about your audience through honest data collection and take your static content and make it into something fun, why wouldn’t you? And so, here at ion, we like to say the question really isn’t why interactive content but instead, why not interactive content?

What We Will Cover This Month

Over the next few weeks, we will be launching several blog posts that will dial us all back to the basics of launching interactive content. From an in-depth breakdown of what interactive content is at its core to a deep dive into what type of content works at every stage of the buyer journey. Sprinkled throughout will be tips on how to launch a successful interactive content program, how to QA your interactive content, and of course, how to take an existing static piece and turn it interactive.

We hope that you find this month to be a very educational and valuable month for you. If there are any topics that you want to see covered during our Back to Basics month, let us know on Twitter! You can find us here or by searching @ioninteractive. :)